Local Cloud ERP for Balkan Mining Operations

Local enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are often disadvantaged (sometimes fatally) when large ERP vendors enter their turfs with all their marketing might, but occasionally they can strike back. One such example would be Apollo, an e-business software solutions provider company founded in 1992 in Serbia, and specialized in complex integrated enterprise solutions for various industries, but with particular expertise in finance, insurance, and manufacturing. Apollo just won a cloud ERP deal with a brand new start-up, Tekomining (so new that its web page is still under construction), based in Serbia and owned by an Austrian investor, with operations in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Tekomining recently acquired several quarries from the once high-flying Austrian civil engineering company Alpine Holding (which at one point had 25,000 employees), part of Spanish FCC Construcción since 2006, and currently in bankruptcy proceedings. Tekomining has also recently acquired two quarries from the Austrian company ASAMER-ALAS Holding.

As its name suggests, ApolloG4 is the company’s fourth-generation ERP suite, released in 2001 as a shared Web application in the hosted architecture, completely redesigned and built from the ground up for delivery over the Internet and software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. Working in Oracle’s technology environment, Apollo has been a technology leader in the region all this time, maintaining strategic partnerships with global IT industry giants such as Oracle, IBM, HP, Intel, and Red Hat.

Tekomining opted for a cloud ERP solution for reasons of expediency; it did not want to maintain an internal IT staff but needed to handle distributed operations over three countries. Apollo G4 reportedly offers complete functionality—not even common add-ons such as Microsoft Excel reports and business intelligence (BI) are needed.

Tekomining needs a multitenant cloud solution that will enable automatic financial consolidation from its three divisions in three Balkan countries (with different financial regulatory systems) in addition to Austrian reporting standards (given that the company’s auditor is in Vienna). The company also demanded a multilingual solution for Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as well as German and English, all of which are supported by ApolloG4 ERP.

Some of the acquired quarries had used local legacy ERP solutions, while the two acquired from ALAS used Microsoft Dynamics NAV and IBM Cognos BI, which were ApolloG4’s only competition in this deal, but much more expensive for the equivalent capabilities. Go-live for about 30 ERP users is planned for 10 weeks from the project start, which has been slated for early June 2014.

This win should encourage savvy local ERP vendors worldwide who feel embattled by the ERP giants entering their markets.

As a matter of interest, Apollo will soon go live for 400 ERP users at Imlek, the largest dairy manufacturer in the Balkans, where it replaced an older instance of Oracle JD Edwards.